Latest Technology News

With the P2P voice communication service Skype now available for Apple's iPhone, eBay's venture into the telecommunications field now is now deployed on the world's most prominent handset. Apple is supporting the application by making it available on the iTunes App Store; reports tout Skype as the single most downloaded free application on iTunes.

That's a problem for carrier partners such as AT&T, because the business model on which the iPhone is based presumes customers will be placing calls on the carrier's network, not through the Internet. Last Friday, AT&T fired a shot across Apple's bow, with its senior executive vice president for legal affairs, Jim Cicconi, stating for USA Today, "We absolutely expect our vendors...not to facilitate the services of our competitors."

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Reuters is reporting that acquisition talks between Sun Microsystems and IBM have collapsed after the smaller company rejected an offer said to be $9.40 / share or less. That reflects a substantial drop from the original offerings of $10-$11 / share, and a decrease from a reported offer of $9.50 / share late last week.

A Sun-IBM merger would have given the new entity a commanding share of the Unix server market and allied one of the Net's pioneering firms with a computing company that has weathered an impressive array of changes in the tech landscape. Sun, which has been cutting staff and otherwise tidying up for potential suitors, is not known to be in discussions with any other company.

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I've been to more than a dozen midnight video game product launches now, and I still get taken aback by how upbeat GameStop's employees are when doing such a launch. But at last night's launch of Nintendo's DSi, I couldn't help but feel sad.

I showed up at my local store hoping to buy two DSis, but without any real expectations of leaving fulfilled as I hadn't pre-ordered Nintendo's newest portable. That's generally the reason why these midnight launches take place: to give the pre-order customers an 8-hour jump on general product availability for being supporters of GameStop.

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Like a cheap tent or a clamshell phone, AT&T has folded on a Terms of Service change made earlier this week that would have prohibited prohibits "customer initiated redirection of television or other video or audio signals via any technology from a fixed location to a mobile device," lumping such streams in with peer-to-peer movie downloads and videocasting.

That language seemed to be directed most closely to Sling, which redirects signals from your television (programs, DVR recordings, digital radio) to another net-enabled recipient -- in the case of the cusp-of-release SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone, to the popular Apple handset.

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After the much heralded Open Cloud Manifesto appeared on Monday, the Web-based document turned into a big topic of talk at this week's Cloud Computing Expo in New York City.

First initiated by Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technologist at Enomaly, the call for open standards in cloud computing soon got backing from IBM, along with EMC, Red Hat, SAP, the Open Group, VMWare, Intel, and numbers of other high profile participants.

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This week, Japanese ISP BIGLOBE and spun-off parent company NEC began testing a new energy conservation incentive in the homes of 100 of its employees that turns carbon emission reduction into a game called Carbon Diet.

The circuit breakers in the testers' homes are connected to a WiFi and ZigBee-enabled device which tracks their electricity consumption. The data from the box is then converted into stats which are used in various online multiplayer games.

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Do not cue the stirring and courageous strains of La Marseillaise: In an unscheduled late-night vote with just a few lawmakers present, French Secretary of State Roger Karoutchi pressed the National Assembly to vote immediately on HADOPI, the controversial "Creation and Internet Law" that would deprive citizens of Net access for up to a year if they're accused of illegal file-sharing. The bill passed 12-4.

The Open... blog has a useful translation of Numerama, one of the first French-language blogs on the scene. French observers reported earlier this week that HADOPI will be enforced in part by software to be installed on every computer, keeping the machines under constant surveillance by the users' ISPs.

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Microsoft's emerging Windows Azure cloud services provider will act as a platform not just for shiny new cloud applications but also for repurposed legacy applications, according to Ranjith Ramakrishnan, CTO of Microsoft third-party partner Cumulux.

According to Ramakrishnan, Microsoft is initially offering four data centers in the US and one in Europe for hosting cloud applications of both sorts. His company is now working on extending Azure enablement to its mPortal mobile portal.

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Angela Belcher and her team of bioengineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have turned the concept of a virus-built battery into a reality.

For the last five years, the team has been engineering a virus known as M13 bacteriophage, which is attracted to inorganic materials. Each virus coats itself with gold and cobalt oxide, effectively turning itself into a fragment of nanowire. When these viruses are then chained together, they form a film that can be used as an anode, or the part of a battery that carries a negative ionic charge.

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Linux-based video game console EVO from Envizions is available for pre-order today. The system is based on a 2.4GHz Athlon 64x2 4850E+ CPU with 2GB of DDR2 expandable to 4GB, an ATI HD3200 graphics processor, a 120GB HDD, and other customizing options.

Unfortunately, the company has rather messily publicized the console's pricing. The "Beta" version of EVO is listed on Envizions' site for $379 (Linux) and $479 (Windows), but is also listed as costing $799.99 for the EVO Smart Console HD (Vista), and $499.99 for the EVO Smart Console (Mirrors Evolution) on the console's dedicated site.

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Consumer and technology advocacy groups in both the United States and Europe are asking for governmental intervention to stop wireless carriers from selectively blocking applications from running on phones. The moves came after carriers in the US prevented Skype from running on 3G data networks, and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile unit in Germany said it may even ban Skype usage over Wi-Fi.

T-Mobile claims that allowing consumers to make voice over IP calls would lead to high bandwidth usage and slow down the network, an assertion that many reject.

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Two days ago, the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) passed in Sweden. The law requires that Internet service providers turn over the IP addresses of file sharers to authorities in cases of suspected copyright infringement.

The chilling effect this law has had on Swedish Internet traffic is palpable. Traffic metric site Netnod Internet Exchange shows that since IPRED was passed on Wednesday, traffic has dropped by around 40%.

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Ah, the life of a security reporter: You ask Microsoft's communcations managers if the new PowerPoint vulnerability announced Thursday evening is a zero-day vulnerability, currently being exploited in the wild with no patch to shield us, and a spokesperson responds that "At this time, Microsoft is only aware of limited and targeted attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability." In other words, yes.

Security Advisory 969136 describes the new problem as one that can allow remote code execution if the file recipient opens an infected file. The Microsoft Security Research & Defense blog is rather more useful (not to mention straightforward -- yes, they're seeing it out in the wild, used in targeted attacks), recommending several defensive maneuvers while we await a patch. Those include using PowerPoint's newer version of XML, temporarily disabling the binary file format if your organization's using PPTX, and forcing legacy PowerPoint files to open in MOICE. Bloggers Bruce Dang and Jonathan Ness note that this is the first time Office 2003 SP3 (fully patched) has been successfully attacked in the wild since its release in September 2007.

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If Apple announced tomorrow that its long-rumored tablet computer was going to be released as an e-book reader, fans of that platform would be lining up outside the stores and squeaking with joy about how the iRead would totally change, like, everything. If Microsoft or Google unveiled a reader, the bickering about monopolies and long-term implications for publishers and libraries would be deafening.

But is there a less high-profile name that can get the general public interested in electronic readers?

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Tell your boss the University of Melbourne says it's probably a good thing for you to hang out on Facebook (or in our comments threads!) today. A study released on Thursday found that people who spend part of their workday surfing the fun stuff online are actually more productive than employees whose networks (or habits) are too buttoned-down.

The survey by the Department of Management and Marketing examined the productivity and habits of 300 workers, 70% of whom said they spend at least some time each day engaging in "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing" (news, YouTube, social networking, shopping and the like). The study found that workers who spent some amount of time doing so -- up to around 20% of their day -- displayed as much as 9% greater productivity.

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